This is an exciting time for Mars exporation with two rovers and a Beagle arriving over the period of a month or so.
Unfortunately the Beagle 2 seems to have followed the Simplified Planetary Local Approach Trajectory that has been so popular with recent Mars landers.
This is quite depressing, but Beagle 2 was a bit of a shoestring mission from the beginning. There's a reasonable chance that one of the NASA rovers will survive, though this is by no means a sure thing.
Even ignoring the technical challenge of having everything work perfectly, the landscape of Mars is quite capable of swallowing up one of these landers without a trace. A poorly placed pile of rocks or a deep gully and you're history.
I think that eventually we will have to send people to Mars, not because of the scientific reasons but just to satisfy our curiosity about what actually happened to all these lost landers.
Perhaps the best science book I've ever read is A Traveler's Guide to Mars. This book is full of the latest imagery from various mapping missions, and the author (well known planetary scientist William K. Hartmann) tells you, in clear enjoyable prose, basically everything we know about Mars and how it has been figured out. It turns out that Mars is way more interesting (and wet) than you probably expect. If you plan on following the Beagle 2 mission and the two NASA rovers that follow next month, then this is the book to have.
There is a large amount of precious minerals on the Moon and Mars. Would it be feasible to bring these valuable materials back on Earth?
That's funny, because the Martian version of slashdot has a story today that starts out:
There is a large amount of precious minerals on the Earth. Would it be feasible to bring these valuable materials back on Mars?
The whole space mining thing strikes me as a fairly feeble excuse for promoting space exploration. Is there any resource that we need so desperately that couldn't be found here on Earth for a fraction of the cost?
There may be lots of good reasons for exploring space, even with humans, but I don't know that this is one of them.
Whatever you find on Mars better be pretty freaking valuable, as the cost to get it back to Earth is probably like $1,000,000 per ounce.
There's a note on MSDN Subscriber Downloads that says that Operating System or higher level MSDN subscribers can get a copy of the PDC DVD(s) containing preview editions of Longhorn, its SDK, and the next Visual Studio version by calling MSDN customer service and asking for a copy.
This is a late comment, so probably nobody will see it, but Amazon's new full-text search feature can be used to search for your favorite Far Side cartoons (and similar things). For example: go to amazon.com and enter "vampcow" as a search term. It will give you a link to Page 6 of one of the Far Side collections which you can click on and it will actually display the scanned page from the book with the cartoon.
Instead of working the extra time to spend $80 - $100 for this, just buy the 5 volumes at $5 - $15 (depends on new or used, paper or hardback) that are already out.
But the new version includes something like 1,100 strips that are not in any collection.
Also over half of the strils in the book have been very nicely colorized by various artists using watercolors, so even if you have the original (black and white) books, the new one is worth having too.
Ok, it's not (yet?) Open Source, and it's not free, but it runs on Linux and we've been using it for about seven years now (the last 4-5 on Linux).
In all that time I don't think I've lost a single message. I regularly keep 10,000 messages in my inbox (you know, all the "important" ones that you intend to do something with some day) and it hums along prefectly happily.
I requires basically zero administration. It just sits there and takes care of itself. It works well with Outlook as a client (important if you can't get your users to give it up) and using a server-based message store means I don't lose any messages when my client disk goes toes up and I can access all my mail and folders from anywhere (remote IMAP or it has a very nice web interface now).
Sure you can do email for free (apart from the full-time admin(s) you have to keep on staff) but if you have a little money to pay for a server, Contact is an excellent way to go. An excellent non-Microsoft replacement for Exchange.
What's next, your local grocery store offering to give away year-old fruit for free? Discounts on expired lottery tickets?
O'Reilly's gesture is a good and excellent thing of course, but most of their titles are computer books that will be obsolete in six months and useless in three years, so having it enter the public domain in 28 years isn't all that impressive:-)
Now if we could get Tim to enter the recording industry...
It might make sense to consider something like a 17" iMac as purely a home-entertainment component. Sure, it's $1800, but you'll probably eventually spend more than that at the iMusic store:-)
Anyone want to bet on how many days go by before someone has reverse-engineered the MaciMusic store protocol and written an app that masquerades as iTunes-on-a-Mac thus allowing Linux and Windows users to purchase music through Apple?
Got a chance to play with the store and the new iTunes on a friend's Mac yesterday.
In general I think this is absolutely a Killer App, and there's a lot of money to be made by Apple, especially if they can get into the Windows marketplace. Clearly Microsoft has dropped the ball on this one as even a cursory look at the Apple set up has one wondering if there will even be any music stores in five years, or even any commercially pressed CDs.
Music is the perfect on-line purchase (even better than books:-) when compared with brick-and-mortar retailing or even traditional on-line sales. The ability to browse and listen to *all* the available tracks is just wonderful.
But it looks like there are still some obstacles to be overcome. Why is there so little music (relatively speaking) available at launch? Why are many popular artists (the Beatles for example) completely missing? Why are so many albums only half there??
Ok, maybe a lot of music is controlled by companies that haven't signed on with Apple yet, but I got the feeling that the record companies really don't trust this system yet and are still afraid that this is going to somehow increase the illegal distribution of their music (like people would buy music from Apple rather than rip it off an original CD).
Is it paranoid to think that perhaps the reason that there are so many albums with only half of their tracks available represents an attempt to see whether these tracks show up more often in song-sharing p2p netowrks than the tracks that haven't been offered?
So I wasn't as impressed as I was holping, only because probably 75-80% of the music I would want to buy isn't yet available on the service.
Assuming that the record companies eventually realize that they can make a hell of a lot of money this way with no distribution costs, and that it doesn't lead to any more theft than unprotectable CD sales already do, and if Apple can win the Windows market as well, then they might eventually make more money off this than computer sales.
One really obvious thing that's missing: the ability to search by song lyrics.
I'm guessing that the actual AAC files downloaded to the Mac are encrypted using a key that's tied to your.mac account and that gets installed on the system when you "register" that system to be able to play your music. It will be interesting to see what the proccedure is if you have three "registered" systems and one of them is stolen or goes up in smoke. Do you permanently lose one of your three system registrations?
I assume that the CDs burned from iTunes are ordinary CDs and there would be nothing stopping someone from turning around and ripping them to mp3.
I have to assume that it was some sort of explosive warhead that was detonated by the heat of the laser.
History clearly demonstrates that all surface-to-air weapons systems demo slightly better when you pack the target to the gills with high explosives.
But yeah, the original momentum isn't getting "blown up", so if the thing that's shooting at you is a battleship lobbing volkswagon-sized projectiles, the fact that you warmed it up a little bit before it hit you isn't going to make much difference.
But if the enemy is going to helpfully pack all his warheads with heat sensitive HE, then this should work great!
The Yahoo Instant Messenger agreement is presented to you in a 2-inch-square window, with no option to print the agreement. If you copy the text out, you find that the agreement is 14 pages long, 7,219 words, 44,847 characters in length. Reading this agreement in the original window would require about 1,000 page-down clicks and probably take the average person a significant fraction of an hour to complete (and would not be a pleasant experience).
We had (at my previous place of employment) a product that let the user manage print job "spool files" on a proprietary commercial operating system (HP 3000 MPE/V). We were already able show the user data going to "open" spoolfiles that were being created, but only up to the point that the last block of records was posted to disk.
The request was to be able to see (in real time) the very latest writes that had been made to the file even though it had not been posted yet. The claim was that the competition did this.
The solution required hunting down the process specific in-memory file buffers for the open spoolfile object and extracting the data from the buffer and polling for new records as the program wrote them (without crashing the machine if the process went away, etc.).
This had to be reverse engineered with no source code for the OS and no help from the OS vendor.
We thought it was a pretty clever hack at the time, more so after finding out that the competitor's program really only displayed the most recently posted full block of data just as our program had done.
We once had a customer ask for a software feature that looked virtually impossible to implement, but the customer claimed that our competitor's product had the feature and that they would buy our product if we added this feature to it. So we figured it couldn't be that hard then, and we managed to add the feature with a couple days effort.
Of course it later turned out that the competing product did not have this feature and in fact nobody had ever done it before.
The first generation of any new technology like this will be expensive for several reasons:
1) It gets them more money up front.
2) It limits the size of the user-base, thus simplifying support costs.
3) It allows the early models to be over-engineered while they are learning how they fail in real-world situations.
4) It restricts the buyers to being a more affluent and therefore theoretically more responsible group. You don't want the "punk ass kids" someone else refered to getting on them right away to start killing themselves and others before people have decided that they are safe.
Once they get into quantity production and they've dealt with all of the legal and perception issues, I would expect the "Mark-II" model to come down to ~$1,000US or so.
Even if this is a real problem, a "recall" might amount to nothing more than it does with most automotive problems. When you hear that Toyota is realliing 1.5 million cars, it doesn't mean that they have to be replaced, more likely that one has to bring the car into a dealer where some small part will be adjusted in five minutes.
Virtually all of the Crusoe functionality seems to be driven by software in flash rom (IIRC), so almost any problem should be fixable by simply flashing or replacing the rom chip.
If this were an old Intel CPU (FDIV bug, etc.) then you *would* be looking at replacing hardware.
Sounds like it might be a good time to pick up some TMTA:-)
These guys have created IBM 370 and 390 emulators that will let you run IBM Mainframe operating systems under Linux! Apparently the original OS/360 operating system is (somehow) in the public domain, and you hand download all of this and IPL your own Mainframe from virtual DASD and run JCL, TSO, etc. The OS/360 download comes with COBOL, PL/I, RPG, and FORTRAN compilers among other things. Quite a kick.
I recall seeing in the latest Wired that they were going to send all their subscribers a barcode reader to let them do the same thing with barcoded ads.
There must be big money in this somewhere. The previous issue of Wired had all the ads encoded with a watermarking technology that supposedly let you hold an ad up to a video camera and extract a URL from it. Even the current issue still has an ad by these video readable ad guys, though this technology sounds too complex and ads a noticable distortion to the ad backgrounds.
I suppose the next step is to print unique barcodes for every ad in every copy of the magazine / catalog printed, allowing them to track all sorts of interesting things.
As has been pointed out, Intel hasn't "open sourced" anything.
What they *have* done, which is unusual, is to release performance data at the individual instruction level *before* the actual chip has shipped.
Normally this information *would* be available at this point, but only under non-disclosure, and therefore generally would not be availabile for use in open source projects like gcc, etc.
Therefore the "open source" connection to this latest Intel information release is the suggestion that they are making this information *public* now at least in part because they recognize the importance of "open source" products, and they don't want the open source community to be at a disadvantage relative to those willing to sign non-disclosures.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an exciting time for Mars exporation with two rovers and a Beagle arriving over the period of a month or so.
Unfortunately the Beagle 2 seems to have followed the Simplified Planetary Local Approach Trajectory that has been so popular with recent Mars landers.
This is quite depressing, but Beagle 2 was a bit of a shoestring mission from the beginning. There's a reasonable chance that one of the NASA rovers will survive, though this is by no means a sure thing.
Even ignoring the technical challenge of having everything work perfectly, the landscape of Mars is quite capable of swallowing up one of these landers without a trace. A poorly placed pile of rocks or a deep gully and you're history.
I think that eventually we will have to send people to Mars, not because of the scientific reasons but just to satisfy our curiosity about what actually happened to all these lost landers.
G.
Perhaps the best science book I've ever read is A Traveler's Guide to Mars. This book is full of the latest imagery from various mapping missions, and the author (well known planetary scientist William K. Hartmann) tells you, in clear enjoyable prose, basically everything we know about Mars and how it has been figured out. It turns out that Mars is way more interesting (and wet) than you probably expect. If you plan on following the Beagle 2 mission and the two NASA rovers that follow next month, then this is the book to have.
G.
There is a large amount of precious minerals on the Moon and Mars. Would it be feasible to bring these valuable materials back on Earth?
That's funny, because the Martian version of slashdot has a story today that starts out:
There is a large amount of precious minerals on the Earth. Would it be feasible to bring these valuable materials back on Mars?
The whole space mining thing strikes me as a fairly feeble excuse for promoting space exploration. Is there any resource that we need so desperately that couldn't be found here on Earth for a fraction of the cost?
There may be lots of good reasons for exploring space, even with humans, but I don't know that this is one of them.
Whatever you find on Mars better be pretty freaking valuable, as the cost to get it back to Earth is probably like $1,000,000 per ounce.
G.
There's a note on MSDN Subscriber Downloads that says that Operating System or higher level MSDN subscribers can get a copy of the PDC DVD(s) containing preview editions of Longhorn, its SDK, and the next Visual Studio version by calling MSDN customer service and asking for a copy.
Contact info here if you're a subscriber.
G.
This is a late comment, so probably nobody will see it, but Amazon's new full-text search feature can be used to search for your favorite Far Side cartoons (and similar things). For example: go to amazon.com and enter "vampcow" as a search term. It will give you a link to Page 6 of one of the Far Side collections which you can click on and it will actually display the scanned page from the book with the cartoon.
G.
Instead of working the extra time to spend $80 - $100 for this, just buy the 5 volumes at $5 - $15 (depends on new or used, paper or hardback) that are already out.
But the new version includes something like 1,100 strips that are not in any collection.
Also over half of the strils in the book have been very nicely colorized by various artists using watercolors, so even if you have the original (black and white) books, the new one is worth having too.
And the colored strips really do look quite nice.
G.
Picked it up at the local Costco here in the SF bay area the other day. They had a pallet-load of them for about $80.
Yes, it actually weighs 19.5 pounds.
G.
With no power, my poor tropical fish have less than a few hours to live
Let's see... Decisions, decisions. Fish or Shashdot..., fish or Slashdot... Hmmm.
Hey! the toilet will still flush without power. Slashdot it is!
Ok, it's not (yet?) Open Source, and it's not free, but it runs on Linux and we've been using it for about seven years now (the last 4-5 on Linux).
In all that time I don't think I've lost a single message. I regularly keep 10,000 messages in my inbox (you know, all the "important" ones that you intend to do something with some day) and it hums along prefectly happily.
I requires basically zero administration. It just sits there and takes care of itself. It works well with Outlook as a client (important if you can't get your users to give it up) and using a server-based message store means I don't lose any messages when my client disk goes toes up and I can access all my mail and folders from anywhere (remote IMAP or it has a very nice web interface now).
Sure you can do email for free (apart from the full-time admin(s) you have to keep on staff) but if you have a little money to pay for a server, Contact is an excellent way to go. An excellent non-Microsoft replacement for Exchange.
Very highly recommended.
G.
That now-free book on configuring Usenet to run over UUCP on 1200 baud modems is going to be really useful.
G.
What's next, your local grocery store offering to give away year-old fruit for free? Discounts on expired lottery tickets?
:-)
O'Reilly's gesture is a good and excellent thing of course, but most of their titles are computer books that will be obsolete in six months and useless in three years, so having it enter the public domain in 28 years isn't all that impressive
Now if we could get Tim to enter the recording industry...
G.
...well, almost.
:-)
It might make sense to consider something like a 17" iMac as purely a home-entertainment component. Sure, it's $1800, but you'll probably eventually spend more than that at the iMusic store
Anyone want to bet on how many days go by before someone has reverse-engineered the MaciMusic store protocol and written an app that masquerades as iTunes-on-a-Mac thus allowing Linux and Windows users to purchase music through Apple?
G.
Got a chance to play with the store and the new iTunes on a friend's Mac yesterday.
:-) when compared with brick-and-mortar retailing or even traditional on-line sales. The ability to browse and listen to *all* the available tracks is just wonderful.
.mac account and that gets installed on the system when you "register" that system to be able to play your music. It will be interesting to see what the proccedure is if you have three "registered" systems and one of them is stolen or goes up in smoke. Do you permanently lose one of your three system registrations?
In general I think this is absolutely a Killer App, and there's a lot of money to be made by Apple, especially if they can get into the Windows marketplace. Clearly Microsoft has dropped the ball on this one as even a cursory look at the Apple set up has one wondering if there will even be any music stores in five years, or even any commercially pressed CDs.
Music is the perfect on-line purchase (even better than books
But it looks like there are still some obstacles to be overcome. Why is there so little music (relatively speaking) available at launch? Why are many popular artists (the Beatles for example) completely missing? Why are so many albums only half there??
Ok, maybe a lot of music is controlled by companies that haven't signed on with Apple yet, but I got the feeling that the record companies really don't trust this system yet and are still afraid that this is going to somehow increase the illegal distribution of their music (like people would buy music from Apple rather than rip it off an original CD).
Is it paranoid to think that perhaps the reason that there are so many albums with only half of their tracks available represents an attempt to see whether these tracks show up more often in song-sharing p2p netowrks than the tracks that haven't been offered?
So I wasn't as impressed as I was holping, only because probably 75-80% of the music I would want to buy isn't yet available on the service.
Assuming that the record companies eventually realize that they can make a hell of a lot of money this way with no distribution costs, and that it doesn't lead to any more theft than unprotectable CD sales already do, and if Apple can win the Windows market as well, then they might eventually make more money off this than computer sales.
One really obvious thing that's missing: the ability to search by song lyrics.
I'm guessing that the actual AAC files downloaded to the Mac are encrypted using a key that's tied to your
I assume that the CDs burned from iTunes are ordinary CDs and there would be nothing stopping someone from turning around and ripping them to mp3.
G.
I have to assume that it was some sort of explosive warhead that was detonated by the heat of the laser.
History clearly demonstrates that all surface-to-air weapons systems demo slightly better when you pack the target to the gills with high explosives.
But yeah, the original momentum isn't getting "blown up", so if the thing that's shooting at you is a battleship lobbing volkswagon-sized projectiles, the fact that you warmed it up a little bit before it hit you isn't going to make much difference.
But if the enemy is going to helpfully pack all his warheads with heat sensitive HE, then this should work great!
G.
The Yahoo Instant Messenger agreement is presented to you in a 2-inch-square window, with no option to print the agreement. If you copy the text out, you find that the agreement is 14 pages long, 7,219 words, 44,847 characters in length. Reading this agreement in the original window would require about 1,000 page-down clicks and probably take the average person a significant fraction of an hour to complete (and would not be a pleasant experience).
How can this be enforcable?
G.
I can see why Python was so quick to adopt the new logo. It looks like "C" in a nosedive, about to crash and burn.
We had (at my previous place of employment) a product that let the user manage print job "spool files" on a proprietary commercial operating system (HP 3000 MPE/V). We were already able show the user data going to "open" spoolfiles that were being created, but only up to the point that the last block of records was posted to disk.
The request was to be able to see (in real time) the very latest writes that had been made to the file even though it had not been posted yet. The claim was that the competition did this.
The solution required hunting down the process specific in-memory file buffers for the open spoolfile object and extracting the data from the buffer and polling for new records as the program wrote them (without crashing the machine if the process went away, etc.).
This had to be reverse engineered with no source code for the OS and no help from the OS vendor.
We thought it was a pretty clever hack at the time, more so after finding out that the competitor's program really only displayed the most recently posted full block of data just as our program had done.
G.
Of course it later turned out that the competing product did not have this feature and in fact nobody had ever done it before.
G.
XML will explode
...killing everyone inside.
G.
The first generation of any new technology like this will be expensive for several reasons:
1) It gets them more money up front.
2) It limits the size of the user-base, thus simplifying support costs.
3) It allows the early models to be over-engineered while they are learning how they fail in real-world situations.
4) It restricts the buyers to being a more affluent and therefore theoretically more responsible group. You don't want the "punk ass kids" someone else refered to getting on them right away to start killing themselves and others before people have decided that they are safe.
Once they get into quantity production and they've dealt with all of the legal and perception issues, I would expect the "Mark-II" model to come down to ~$1,000US or so.
G.
Looks like I'm going to have to buy the white album again soon.
G.
Even if this is a real problem, a "recall" might amount to nothing more than it does with most automotive problems. When you hear that Toyota is realliing 1.5 million cars, it doesn't mean that they have to be replaced, more likely that one has to bring the car into a dealer where some small part will be adjusted in five minutes.
:-)
Virtually all of the Crusoe functionality seems to be driven by software in flash rom (IIRC), so almost any problem should be fixable by simply flashing or replacing the rom chip.
If this were an old Intel CPU (FDIV bug, etc.) then you *would* be looking at replacing hardware.
Sounds like it might be a good time to pick up some TMTA
G.
These guys have created IBM 370 and 390 emulators that will let you run IBM Mainframe operating systems under Linux! Apparently the original OS/360 operating system is (somehow) in the public domain, and you hand download all of this and IPL your own Mainframe from virtual DASD and run JCL, TSO, etc. The OS/360 download comes with COBOL, PL/I, RPG, and FORTRAN compilers among other things. Quite a kick.
I recall seeing in the latest Wired that they were going to send all their subscribers a barcode reader to let them do the same thing with barcoded ads.
There must be big money in this somewhere. The previous issue of Wired had all the ads encoded with a watermarking technology that supposedly let you hold an ad up to a video camera and extract a URL from it. Even the current issue still has an ad by these video readable ad guys, though this technology sounds too complex and ads a noticable distortion to the ad backgrounds.
I suppose the next step is to print unique barcodes for every ad in every copy of the magazine / catalog printed, allowing them to track all sorts of interesting things.
Ain't technology grand?
G.
As has been pointed out, Intel hasn't "open sourced" anything.
What they *have* done, which is unusual, is to release performance data at the individual instruction level *before* the actual chip has shipped.
Normally this information *would* be available at this point, but only under non-disclosure, and therefore generally would not be availabile for use in open source projects like gcc, etc.
Therefore the "open source" connection to this latest Intel information release is the suggestion that they are making this information *public* now at least in part because they recognize the importance of "open source" products, and they don't want the open source community to be at a disadvantage relative to those willing to sign non-disclosures.
G.